Therefore, businesses who wish to build the strongest, closest relationships with their customers should seek to build emotional engagement.

Engaging customers is more important (and more difficult) than ever – in the crowded, consumer-centric marketplace, price or product is no longer a deal breaker. Real commercial benefits and significant competitive advantage now comes from emotionally satisfied customers. Indeed, customers now expect companies to understand them on an emotional level and deliver products and services that are highly tailored and personalised to their own specific circumstances. Additionally, recently, BT’s CMO Zaid Al-Qassab warned that an overly digital focus for marketers will result in companies forgetting how to connect with their customers.

Within any organisation, the stronger the emotional connection – the stronger the commercial relationship.

Ok, so we know emotional engagement is important. But what is emotional engagement? How do you measure it? What can you do to capitalise on an emotional connection with customers? All valid questions.

What?

Emotional engagement, much like emotions themselves, is a complex matter, consisting of many intertwining components and sub components such as:

These elements will vary across different contexts…

For example, trust levels between company and customer will vary depending on the length and depth of the relationship. Emotional engagement is something that develops and endures over time; the more frequently and consistently you connect with your customers emotionally, the better.

…and circumstances:

As the customer journey progresses, emotional priorities will shift. For example, at the beginning of a sales process, enthusiasm may be the most important, but when dealing with customer services and support, trust and empathy take over.

To succeed, companies must align their emotional engagement strategy with specific needs and objectives of their customers.

How?

In terms of how to identify and measure emotional engagement – we can help with that. Developing a successful emotional engagement strategy begins with understanding customers’ needs, intentions and opinions. Customer insight is the key to unlocking emotional engagement and injecting relevance into the customer/company relationship.

At Customer Satisfaction UK we measure both rational satisfaction (e.g. “Do customers like your products?”) and emotional satisfaction (e.g. “How do customers feel about your company?”). Combining quantitative metrics such as Net Promoter Score with a wide range of qualitative and open ended questions ensures that we know both WHAT your customers think and WHY they think it

Ongoing customer feedback will provide you with the insight needed to understand your customers’ emotional motivators in great depth. You are then able to develop a business strategy that focuses on the relevant elements of your customer experience, maximising emotional engagement with your customers and consequently enjoy commercial benefits such as increased sales and a loyal and returning customer-base.